This ticket doesn't really make sense. Forbidding examples in docstrings would be bad style. If there are places where the examples are confusing, rather then enlightening, or drown out the real description, patches to clarify/remove would be useful. If you're worried that people might think those examples are actually run as tests, a patch to contributing.txt or a patch to the testing framework to run the doctests would be useful.

But the general statement in the ticket description wouldn't be a good road to go down. Docstrings should be as clear as possible and doctest happened to choose (re-use) a style that was particularly clear. Using that style without it being a doctest is fine.